The Sermon for St. Matthew

Life Story of St. Paul

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”Romans 12: 1-2

Ann and I were walking up Cornmarket St. in Oxford heading for the Sheldonian or it might have been the Eagle and Child to pay our homage to C.S. Lewis. I’m not sure, but this I am sure of, as we walked along that day feeling Oxford, feeling centuries of England and poetry and learning in our bones Ann suddenly stopped and declared, “What is that I smell?” “I don’t know,” I said, “but it is delicious and I want some. It even makes me feel good – this is the odor English?” I asked. And that is when Ann said, “No, it isn’t England, look there on the corner, that’s Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken that we smell.” And it was. The smell of southern fried chicken had followed both of us deep from memories of our mothers’ Sunday table all the way to Oxford England. It is actually a bit disturbing that we had been fooled into thinking that we smelled something delicious that we had never smelled before. How easy it is to be misled by our own desires. We will return to this in a moment because I think it will help us understand this text a little better.

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

The central point of this verse answers the question: “What kind of worship pleases God and why?” Some folk have probably never thought of this verse from within the liturgical context, but it is very much that. The word that we have translated as “service” is used exclusively in the New Testament to mean the worship of God and that use survives in our tradition when we refer to our acolytes, the crucifier, and the boat boy as serving at the altar; that is worshipping at the altar. But furthermore Paul makes a point that the kind of worship God calls us to is rational – our translation has it as “reasonable service.” And if that is not enough to make the point other words in the sentence pile on the same meaning. The word we have translated “present,” as it is used here describes the act of presenting a gift to God in a formal liturgical setting; it refers to the specific act of worship in which the gift, the sacrifice is presented on the altar. That word, the word for sacrifice, is exactly the word used here and it appears 11 times in the New Testament (4 of those in Hebrews) and it always means an offering to God. We have an example of this usage when St. Paul wrote to a parish in Philippi that had made a gift to him for his work – Paul referred to the gift as sacrifice to God:

“But I have all, and abound: I am full, having received of Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you, an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well pleasing to God.”
Philippians 4:18

And as I said last week if we take this text moralistically and understand it as an appeal for Christians to exercise bodily discipline against sin and thus make it all about me and my will power and not about the worship of the faithful, I think we will miss the point and possibly undermine the good fruit of righteousness that St. Paul is absolutely confident will follow from presenting our bodies to God as a living sacrifice in the Holy Communion:

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

It might help to remember that we have committed ourselves to Christian orthodoxy but we also need to remind ourselves that the word orthodox does not just mean believing the right thing nor does it mean merely doing the right thing – the word literally means worshiping the right way – (ortho) correct, (doxa) worship. I realize that probably sounds imperialistic to well-meaning Christians who care deeply, as we all should, that people feel comfortable and at home in Christian worship today. That is no small thing, but our desires need training and formation and Paul is robustly confident that the worship that pleases God will also form the desires of our hearts. Thus ortho-doxy does not only mean correct worship, something that could easily become a matter of sinful pride, it also means correcting worship, that is worship may, by the grace of God, become remedial, corrective in the sense that worship is God’s instrument of choice for our salvation and for our perfecting in grace. Just as orthopedic shoes correct or prevent potentially serious problems for our bodies, worshipping the blessed Trinity not only directs our individual and collective devotion and gratitude to God, but it also brings us into conformity with Christ through instruction, repentance and confession of our sins, and on to growth in our devotion and gratitude to God for his abundant mercies. So worship that pleases God has a total effect, but there are many parts to it and each part – praise, adoration, confession, absolution, and our resolution to bring our lives into conformity to the life of Christ – all that enfolds us as it unfolds, a uniting these diverse activities into a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving as we worship God in the Holy Communion. The total effect is that we are what we eat, we imitate that which we admire, and we become what or whom we worship.

So for example what we do in worship when we sing is different from what the preacher does when he preaches a sermon. We do not expect the same thing from the singer and that we expect from the preacher. When we sing a congregational hymn it is usually a hymn that we have sung many times in the past and if it is new and if we approve of the content and the form we will probably sing it many times over in the future. When our choir sings an anthem it may be an anthem that we have heard before but even if it is new it is likely that we will hear it again because leaning a new piece of music requires attentiveness to the work and practice and direction and so there is so much invested that it we want to get all we can from the effort. But then there is also the desire to perform it again because each performance perfects the skill and deepens the parish experience of worship. This way the hymn or the anthem we repeat is another offering of this instantiation of the Bride to the Bridegroom, an offering, a sacrifice of the love and thanksgiving of the Church to God himself. The work of the celebrant of the mass is similar to the work of the singer, he too is expected to stick to the text and any celebrant who decides to add his personal extemporaneous prayers to the mass is exercising a supreme arrogance and by adding he would actually subtract from worship by distracting us from our focus upon God. The celebrant performs and over time he gathers a feel for the words, the phrases, the sentences and the moments of silence and he wants to do well – not as entertainment, but like the congregation, the cantor and the choir, as one who is praying the common prayer of the Church. When we sing a hymn we usually cover old ground and we may cover it for better or for worse. The celebrant when he says the mass is covering old familiar ground and coving it for better or for worse – we all do our best. But the preacher who only covers old ground even if he does so as a virtuoso is not doing his job and his particular danger is that the greater his skill the better job he may do of covering up his failure and even fooling himself. The preacher should not dish out comfort food in the pulpit all the time. Which means that the preacher should not be stuffing himself with comfort food instead of real study because it will make him fat and lazy and unfit for the work of preaching. Singing a hymn or an anthem, celebrating the mass, serving at the altar and preaching a sermon have different functions and each and all are necessary for the good of Christ’s Body and Bride, the Church. All of these activities unfold into reasonable, bodily worship of the blessed Trinity. But why reasonable?

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

The reason the full engagement of our intellect in understanding experience, judging and deciding to act on the truly good with respect to who and how we worship is because the fall was a result of turning our back on our own understanding, it is an example of truncating judgment, and it is also an example of choosing what appeared to be a good rather than deliberately choosing the truly good.

Because our ability to grasp reality and rightly judge and choose the truly good is an accurate description of our created endowment as human beings and our misuse & outright truncation of that endowment is what happened in the fall – we must appropriate our understanding and judgment that the God of Israel has been revealed by Jesus the Messiah to be a Trinity of Persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, the reasonable conclusion for people who believe that to be true is the judgment that the God of Israel is the God who is God and God and he should be the entire focus of our attention, our love, our devotion and our worship.

That is why true worship involves the use of humanity’s highest powers, the very powers that were put to misuse by consciously and intentionally dismissing God and siding with a lie – in true worship we appropriate our endowment of reason and understanding to pass correct judgments, to know and to choose the truly good as we devote our selves, our souls, and our bodies to Jesus the Messiah. In true worship our minds; our highest powers are renewed in the power of the resurrected Christ. St. Paul was confident that our capacity to grasp reality and to know and choose the truly good is renewed in our worship of Christ and it is the source of our renewed moral life. The more we worship Jesus the Messiah in the Holy Communion but greater will be our grasp of the truth and the more reliable will be our discernment of the good will of God. As we engage our highest faculties in the worship of Christ our God we learn to distinguish between our desires and the truly good, we learn to distinguish between reality of Christ and illusions of the world.

“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

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“For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” […]